Program Speakers A-Z

The founding cellist of the Bang on a Can All Stars, cellist Maya Beiser is a frequent collaborator with artists across the spectrum of creativity -- visual artists such as Shirin Neshat, video artists such as Irit Batsry -- to produce groundbreaking multimedia concerts.

Composers who write for her follow her passion for melding influences -- Middle Eastern sounds, classic and modern tones. Her newest project, Elsewhere, is described as "a CELLoOpera." Elsewhere is an imaginative retelling of the Biblical legend of Lot's wife, created by the "dream team" of Maya, director Robert Woodruff, composers Missy Mazzoli and Eve Beglarian, writer Erin Cressida Wilson, and choreographer Karole Armitage

Eythor Bender is the CEO of Berkeley Bionics, which augments humans with wearable, powered and artificially intelligent devices called exoskeletons or "wearable robots." User of the HULC (Human Universal Load Carrier) can carry up to 200 pounds for hours and over all terrains. eLEGS, an exoskeleton for wheelchair users, powers paraplegics up to get them standing and walking.

Bender has fostered innovation with bionic and orthopedic technologies throughout his career, taking them from unconventional approaches to sustainable, FDA-approved products that help individuals participate in their community. Such was the case with the boomerang-shaped prosthesis Cheetah Flex-Foot by Ossur, worn by the history-making bilateral amputee Oscar Pistorius. Bender's team fought for, and won, Pistorius' right to compete in the Olympics.

Working with an extraordinary array of tools -- from 3-D printers to lasers to flasks of algae -- Ed Boyden is creating new brains. A pioneer in the field of optogenetics, he is the founder and principal investigator of the synthetic neurobiology group at MIT.

Using a combination of lasers and genetic engineering, he implants brains with optical fibers that allow him to activate special proteins in specific neurons and see their connections. In addition to helping create detailed maps of brain circuitry, the engineering of these cells has been used to cure blindness in mice, and could point the way to cures for Parkinsons or Alzheimers, or to ways of connecting to the brain via prosthetics.

Writer and thinker David Brooks has covered business, crime and politics (as well as subbing in as the Wall Street Journal's movie critic) over a long career in journalism. He's now an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times in a legendary run that started in September 2003.

His column looks deeply into the social currents that underpin American life. He's the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. His newest book, The Social Animal, examines new findings in brain science in the context of a story about two succesful people whose lives unfold in ways that neurological research is helping us understand more deeply. 

Sunni Brown is co-author of GameStorming: A Playbook for Rule-breakers, Innovators and Changemakers. She’s known for her large-scale live content visualizations, and she is also the leader of the Doodle Revolution – a growing effort to debunk the myth that doodling is a distraction. Using common sense, experience and neuroscience, Sunni is proving that to doodle is to ignite your whole mind. Look for her second book, The Doodle Revolution, in 2012.

Her consultancy, BrightSpot I.D., specializes in visual thinking and information design. She was trained in graphic facilitation at the Grove Consultants International, a San Francisco-based company that pioneered the use of large-scale visuals in business settings. Sunni co-founded VizThink Austin, which under her leadership grew to be the largest visual thinking community in the United States.

Homaro Cantu is a chef and an inventor of futuristic food delivery systems. A graduate of Le Cordon Bleu in Portland, Oregon, he's an alum of Charlie Trotter’s restaurant in Chicago, where he rose to the position of Sous Chef. After he left Charlie Trotter’s, he concentrated on the development of his concept of an experiential design-based restaurant with a molecular gastronomy approach. Moto Restaurant puts Cantu’s concepts and creations into practice by melding food with science, technology and art. Michael Eisner once described Cantu as the most revolutionary person in food since Ray Kroc.

Through his company Cantu Designs, Chef Cantu has filed numerous patent applications covering dining implements, cookware, printed food and is working on developing his inventions for commercial, humanitarian and aerospace applications.

He says: "Any idea's a great idea as long as it tastes great."

David Christian is by training a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, but since the 1980s he has become interested in world history on very large scales. He has written on the social and material history of the 19th-century Russian peasantry, in particular on aspects of diet and the role of alcohol. In 1989, he began teaching courses on "Big History," surveying the past on the largest possible scales, including those of biology and astronomy.

Christian is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Over the next few years he will also be working with the support of Bill Gates to create an online course in "Big History" for high school students.

Béatrice Coron tells stories informed by life. Her own life colors her work: after briefly studying art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Lyon, and Mandarin Chinese at the Université of Lyon III, Coron experienced life with a series of odd jobs. She has been, among others, a shepherdess, truck driver, factory worker, cleaning lady and New York City tour guide. She has lived in France (her native country) , Egypt and Mexico for one year each, and China for two years. She moved to New York in 1985, where she reinvented herself as an artist.

Coron's oeuvre includes illustration, book arts, fine art and public art. She cuts her characteristic silhouette designs in paper and Tyvek. She also creates works in stone, glass, metal, rubber, stained glass and digital media. Her work has been purchased by major museum collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum, the Walker Art Center and The Getty. Her public art can be seen in subways, airport and sports facilities among others.

Antonio Damasio is a leader in understanding the biological origin of consciousness. He also argues that emotions, far from being barriers to it, are a crucial component of decision-making. He is founder and director of the USC Brain and Creativity Institute, which draws on partners across academic disciplines to use the explosion of new neuroscience results to tackle issues from mental health to societal and global change.

Damasio is the author of Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, which was adapted into a musical composition performed by Yo-Yo Ma at the American Museum of Natural History.

By any measure, Roger Ebert was a legend. The first person to win a Pulitzer for film criticism, as film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, he was best known for his decades-long reign as the co-host of Sneak Previews, a TV show with fellow Chicago critic Gene Siskel. For 23 years and three title changes (finally settling on Siskel and Ebert and the Movies) the two critics offered smart, short-form film criticism that guided America's moviegoing. After Gene Siskel died in 1999, Ebert kept on with critic Richard Roeper. (And he was also the co-screenwriter of the Russ Meyer cult classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a fact that astounded more than a few young film students.)

In 2006, Ebert began treatment for thyroid cancer. He told the story of his many surgeries and setbacks in an immensely-worth-reading Esquire story in 2010. Enduring procedure after procedure, he eventually lost the lower part of his jaw -- and with it his ability to eat and speak. Turning to his blog and to Twitter, he found a new voice for his film work and his sparkling thoughts on ... just about everything. He tried his hand as an Amazon affiliate, became a finalist in the New Yorker caption contest, and started a controversy or two. In 2013 Ebert passed away from cancer at the age of 70.

Janet Echelman builds living, breathing sculpture environments that respond to the forces of nature — wind, water and light— and become inviting focal points for civic life.

Exploring the potential of unlikely materials, from fishing net to atomized water particles, Echelman combines ancient craft with cutting-edge technology to create her permanent sculpture at the scale of buildings. Experiential in nature, the result is sculpture that shifts from being an object you look at, to something you can get lost in.

Recent prominent works include “Her Secret is Patience”, which spans two city blocks in downtown Phoenix,  “Water Sky Garden”, which premiered for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, and “She Changes”, which transformed a waterfront plaza in Porto, Portugal.  Her newest commission creates a “Zone of Recomposure” in the new Terminal 2 at San Francisco International Airport. Upcoming projects include the remaking of Dilworth Plaza in front of Philadelphia City Hall -- turning it into a garden of dry-mist.

A broad thinker who studies the intersection of science, business and society, Juan Enriquez has a talent for bridging disciplines to build a coherent look ahead. Enriquez was the founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, and has published widely on topics from the technical (global nucleotide data flow) to the sociological (gene research and national competitiveness), and was a member of Celera Genomics founder Craig Venter's marine-based team to collect genetic data from the world's oceans.

Formerly CEO of Mexico City's Urban Development Corporation and chief of staff for Mexico's secretary of state, Enriquez played a role in reforming Mexico's domestic policy and helped negotiate a cease-fire with Zapatista rebels. He is a Managing Director at Excel Medical Ventures, a life sciences venture capital firm, and the chair and CEO of Biotechonomy, a research and investment firm helping to fund new genomics firms. The Untied States of America looks at the forces threatening America's future as a unified country.

In his TED Book Homo Evolutis (written with Steve Gullens), Enriquez explores the far reaches of human change, and asks: Are we done evolving?

As president of the Institute of Medicine, Harvey Fineberg thinks deeply about new medicine, both its broad possibilities and the moral and philosophical questions that each new treatment brings. How do we decide which treatment to use in a tricky case -- both individually and as a community? Is it fair that the richest hospitals get the best healthcare? Who should bear the risk (and gain the reward) of trying the newest treatments?

Fineberg helped found and served as president of the Society for Medical Decision Making and also served as consultant to the World Health Organization. He was provost of Harvard from 1997 to 2001, following thirteen years as Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. He has devoted most of his academic career to the fields of health policy and medical decision making. His past research has focused on the process of policy development and implementation, assessment of medical technology, evaluation and use of vaccines, and dissemination of medical innovations.

William Clay Ford Jr. is the executive chair of the Ford Motor Company, founded by his great-grandfather, Henry Ford, in Detroit. This massive company found great success selling cars to the world. Now, Ford is looking toward a future that's not simply about selling more and more cars. Ford looks to a future where cars are greener and cleaner, move more efficiently on better, smarter road systems -- and sometimes are replaced by mass transit and other forms of mobility.

Ford joined Ford Motor Company in 1979 as a product planning analyst.  He subsequently held a variety of positions in manufacturing, sales, marketing, product development and finance.  During the breakthrough 1982 Ford-United Auto Workers labor talks, which launched the employee involvement movement that revolutionized the industry, he served on the company’s National Bargaining Team.

Mr. Ford joined the Board of Directors in 1988 and has been its chairman since January 1999.  He serves as chairman of the board's Finance Committee and as a member of the Sustainability Committee.  He also served as chief executive officer of the company from October 2001 to September 2006, when he was named executive chairman.

As CEO, Mr. Ford improved quality, lowered costs and delivered exciting new products.  During his time in that position he took the company from a $5.5 billion loss in 2001 to three straight years of profitability.  Through the years, his vision for the company has remained unchanged.

He says: "The ongoing success of Ford Motor Company is my life’s work. We want to have an even greater impact in our next 100 years than we did in our first 100."

Bill Gates is founder and former CEO of Microsoft. A geek icon, tech visionary and business trailblazer, Gates' leadership -- fueled by his long-held dream that millions might realize their potential through great software -- made Microsoft a personal computing powerhouse and a trendsetter in the Internet dawn. Whether you're a suit, chef, quant, artist, media maven, nurse or gamer, you've probably used a Microsoft product today.

In summer of 2008, Gates left his day-to-day role with Microsoft to focus on philanthropy. Holding that all lives have equal value (no matter where they're being lived), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has now donated staggering sums to HIV/AIDS programs, libraries, agriculture research and disaster relief -- and offered vital guidance and creative funding to programs in global health and education. Gates believes his tech-centric strategy for giving will prove the killer app of planet Earth's next big upgrade.

In his second annual letter, released in late January 2010, Gates takes stock of his first full year with the Gates Foundation. Read Bill Gates' annual letter for 2010. And follow his ongoing thinking on his personal website, The Gates Notes.

Thomas Heatherwick founded Heatherwick Studio in 1994 with his aim being "to bring architecture, design and sculpture together within a single practice." On the team, architects, landscape architects, designers and engineers work from a combined studio and workshop, where concept development, detailing, prototyping and small-scale fabrication take place. The studio's work spans commercial and residential building projects, masterplanning and infrastructure schemes as well as high profile works of public art.

From his biography at the Design Museum:

Heatherwick finds pleasure in what other designers might perceive as unconventional commissions, like the entrance and carpark for Guys Hospital, near London Bridge. He responded with an organic woven façade, created from stainless steel braid that requires little maintenance and creates a new system for routing traffic. In this context, what Heatherwick cites as his dream design job is unsurprising: a large-scale car park for the 1970s new town, Milton Keynes. “It’s is a weird place but I find it exciting because its infrastructure is taken so seriously,” Heatherwick explains, “It needs multistory car parks. But what world-class example of a well designed car park can you think of? There’s not much competition and they’re a very cheap building typology so you could build the best car park in the world for a fraction of the cost of the fanciest new art gallery… I’d like to work on the world’s best car park.”

Shea Hembrey's art imitates nature’s forms, in an attempt to appreciate how humans have always appropriated and learned from forms in nature. An early fascination with birds (as a teenager, he was a licensed breeder of migratory waterfowl), led to "Mirror Nests," a series of metal replicas of bird nests exhibited at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology observatory.

Hembrey works with focused concentration on a single project, letting his research into his subject direct the media and methods of the final product. He has produced works on folk and faith healing inspired by his healer grandfather, and his view of art was profoundly changed while studying Maori art while he was a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar to New Zealand.

As director of a groundbreaking robotics lab, Dennis Hong guides his team of students through projects on robot locomotion and mechanism design, creating award-winning humanoid robots like DARwIn (Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence). His team is known as RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) and operates at Virginia Tech.

Hong has also pioneered various innovations in soft-body robots, using a “whole-skin locomotion” as inspired by amoebae. Marrying robotics with biochemistry, he has been able to generate new types of motion with these ingenious forms. For his contributions to the field, Hong was selected as a NASA Summer Faculty Fellow in 2005, given the CAREER award by the National Science Foundation in 2007 and in 2009, named as one of Popular Science's Brilliant 10. He is also a gourmet chef and a magician, performing shows for charity and lecturing on the science of magic.

Paleontologist Jack Horner discovered the first dinosaur eggs in the Western Hemisphere, the first evidence of dinosaur colonial nesting, the first evidence of parental care among dinosaurs, and the first dinosaur embryos.

Horner's research covers a wide range of topics about dinosaurs, including their behavior, physiology, ecology and evolution. Due to struggles with the learning disability, dyslexia, Horner does not hold a formal college degree but was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Montana in 1986. Also in 1986 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

He's the Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, and is widely acknowledged to be the inspiration for the main character in the book and film Jurassic Park.

Musician, teacher, filmmaker and game designer, John Hunter has dedicated his life to helping children realize their full potential. His own life story is one of a never-ending quest for harmony. As a student, he studied comparative religions and philosophy while traveling through Japan, China and India. In India, inspired by Ghandi's philosophy, he began to think about the role of the schoolteacher in creating a more peaceful world.

As his online biography says: "Accepting the reality of violence, he would seek to incorporate ways to explore harmony in various situations. This exploration would take form in the framework of a game – something that students would enjoy. Within the game data space, they would be challenged, while enhancing collaborative and communication skills."

In 1978, at the Richmond Community High School, Hunter led the first sessions of his World Peace Game, a hands-on political simulation. The game has now been played around the world, on a four-tiered board. It's the subject of the new film World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements.

Read John Hunter's note to the community following the publication of his TEDTalk >>

Working anonymously, pasting his giant images on buildings, trains, bridges, the often-guerrilla artist JR forces us to see each other. Traveling to distant, often dangerous places -- the slums of Kenya, the favelas of Brazil -- he infiltrates communities, befriending inhabitants and recruiting them as models and collaborators. He gets in his subjects’ faces with a 28mm wide-angle lens, resulting in portraits that are unguarded, funny, soulful, real, that capture the sprits of individuals who normally go unseen. The blown-up images pasted on urban surfaces – the sides of buildings, bridges, trains, buses, on rooftops -- confront and engage audiences where they least expect it. Images of Parisian thugs are pasted up in bourgeois neighborhoods; photos of Israelis and Palestinians are posted together on both sides of the walls that separate them.

JR's most recent project, "Women Are Heroes," depicts women "dealing with the effects of war, poverty, violence, and oppression” from Rio de Janeiro, Phnom Penh, Delhi and several African cities. And his TED Prize wish opens an even wider lens on the world -- asking us all to turn the world inside out. Visit insideoutproject.net ...

hands are not about politics / this is a poem about love / and fingers/ fingers interlock like a beautiful zipper of prayer

--Sarah Kay

Plenty of 14-year-old girls write poetry. But few hide under the bar of the famous Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan’s East Village absorbing the talents of New York’s most exciting poets. Sarah Kay also had the guts to take its stage and hold her own against performers at least a decade her senior. Her talent for weaving words into poignant, funny, and powerful performances paid off.

Now 22, Kay is a successful spoken word poet and codirects Project V.O.I.C.E. (Vocal Outreach Into Creative Expression). Founded by Kay in 2004, Project V.O.I.C.E. encourages people, particularly teenagers, to use spoken word as a tool for understanding the world and self, and a medium for vital expression.

Her poem "B" has been turned into a hardcover book >>

Salman Khan is the founder and faculty of the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org)-- a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a free world-class education to anyone, anywhere.  It now consists of self-paced software and, with over 1 million unique students per month, the most-used educational video repository on the Internet (over 30 million lessons delivered to-date).  All 2000+ video tutorials, covering everything from basic addition to advanced calculus, physics, chemistry and biology, have been made by Salman. 

Prior to the Khan Academy, Salman was a senior analyst at a hedge fund and had also worked in technology and venture capital.  He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.Eng and B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in mathematics from MIT.

From war correspondent to Baghdad bureau chief to Director General from 2003 until he stepped down in 2011, Wadah Khanfar worked through the closure and bombing of Al Jazeera's bureaus, the torture and murder of its journalists and state propaganda smears. Al Jazeera's approach to journalism emphasizes "re-thinking authority, giving a voice to the voiceless," Khanfar said in an interview with TIME.

No news network has attracted as much controversy as Al Jazeera. Khanfar, in turn, became the lightning rod for dispute on the organization's place in politics, both in its home region and abroad. (In the West, editorials have accused him of sympathizing with terrorists; in his own region, of fanning instability.) 

Aaron Koblin finds art through the unlikely confluence of massive data sets and personal intimacy. His work ranges from animating the paths of every North American airline flight, to using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform to pay workers to “draw a sheep facing left,” which were then placed in "The Sheep Market."

Koblin was creative director for Johnny Cash's final music video, "Ain't No Grave," and worked on Radiohead’s video “House of Cards,” both of which received a Grammy nomination. He is now the Creative Director of the Data Arts team in Google's Creative Lab. His team collaborated with Arcade Fire to produce an online music video that allows viewers to incorporate images of their home neighborhood into the experience using Google Street View.

Ralph Langner heads Langner, an independent cyber-security firm that specializes in control systems -- electronic devices that monitor and regulate other devices, such as manufacturing equipment. These devices' deep connection to the infrastructure that runs our cities and countries has made them, increasingly, the targets of an emerging, highly sophisticated type of cyber-warfare. And since 2010, when the Stuxnet computer worm first reared its head, Langner has stood squarely in the middle of the battlefield.

As part of a global effort to decode the mysterious program, Langner and his team analyzed Stuxnet's data structures, and revealed what he believes to be its ultimate intent: the control system software known to run centrifuges in nuclear facilities -- specifically, facilities in Iran. Further analysis by Langner uncovered what seem to be Stuxnet's shocking origins, which he revealed in his TED2011 talk. (PS: He was right.)

Janna Levin is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her scientific research concerns the early universe, chaos and black holes. Her second book – a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines – won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for Writers and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award for "a distinguished book of first fiction." She is the author of the popular science book, How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space.

She holds a BA in Physics and Astronomy from Barnard College with a concentration in Philosophy, and a PhD from MIT in Physics. She has worked at the Center for Particle Astrophysics (CfPA) at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to the UK where she worked at Cambridge University in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). Just before returning to New York, she was the first scientist-in-residence at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford with an award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and Arts (NESTA).

Listen to a Q&A with another TED speaker, Krista Tippett -- where they talk math and faith and truth and more ...

With a remarkable record of achievement, General Stanley McChrystal has been praised for creating a revolution in warfare that fused intelligence and operations. A four-star general, he is the former commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan and the former leader of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which oversees the military’s most sensitive forces. McChrystal’s leadership of JSOC is credited with the December 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein and the June 2006 location and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal, a former Green Beret, is known for his candor.

After McChrystal graduated from West Point, he was commissioned as an infantry officer, and spent much of his career commanding special operations and airborne infantry units. During the Persian Gulf War, McChrystal served in a Joint Special Operations Task Force and later commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment. He completed year-long fellowships at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1997 and in 2000 at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2002, he was appointed chief of staff of military operations in Afghanistan. Two years later, McChrystal was selected to deliver nationally televised Pentagon briefings about military operations in Iraq. From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal commanded JSOC and was responsible for leading the nation’s deployed military counter-terrorism efforts around the globe. He assumed command of all International Forces in Afghanistan in June 2009. President Obama’s order for an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan was based on McChrystal’s assessment of the war there. McChrystal retired from the military in August 2010.

Bobby McFerrin is one of the world's best-known vocal innovators and improvisers, a world-renowned classical conductor and a passionate spokesman for music education. His recordings have sold more than 20 million copies (including the sunny classic, "Don't Worry, Be Happy"), and his collaborations including those with with Yo-Yo Ma, Chick Corea, the Vienna Philharmonic and Herbie Hancock have established him as an ambassador of both the classical and jazz worlds.

McFerrin has worked with such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Paul Nicklen grew up one of only a few non-Inuit in an Inuit settlement on Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada -- a childhood that taught him the patience, stamina and respect for nature required for his beat in the frigid climes of Earth’s polar regions. Best known for his vivid and intimate wildlife photos for National Geographic, Nicklen started out a biologist in the Northwest Territories, gathering data on such species as lynx, grizzlies, and polar bears. Today he bridges the gap between scientific research and the public, showing how fragile and fast-changing habitats are profoundly affecting wildlife.

During the course of his workday Nicklen regularly comes face-to-face with fantastic creatures: narwhals, Arctic foxes, elephant seals, and more. His most amazing experience? An underwater encounter with a leopard seal who for four days tried to feed him penguins through the "mouth" of his lens.

Growing up reading philosophy, playing guitar, and generally not thinking about science, Aaron O’Connell never expected to revolutionize the world of physics. But an inspiring stuffed-monkey-shot-from-a-cannon demonstration and a series of positive research experiences as an undergraduate propelled him to graduate school at UCSB.

While there, in an experiment remarkable both for its conceptual simplicity and technical difficulty, O’Connell was the first person to measure quantum effects in an object large enough to see with the naked eye. Named Breakthrough of the year by Science Magazine, the experiment shattered the previous record for the largest quantum object, showing decisively that there is no hard line between the quantum and everyday worlds.

Jamie Oliver has been drawn to the kitchen since he was a child working in his father's pub-restaurant. He showed not only a precocious culinary talent but also a passion for creating (and talking about) fresh, honest, delicious food. In the past decade, the shaggy-haired "Naked Chef" of late-'90s BBC2 has built a worldwide media conglomerate of TV shows, books, cookware and magazines, all based on a formula of simple, unpretentious food that invites everyone to get busy in the kitchen. And as much as his cooking is generous, so is his business model -- his Fifteen Foundation, for instance, trains young chefs from challenged backgrounds to run four of his restaurants.

Now, Oliver is using his fame and charm to bring attention to the changes that Brits and Americans need to make in their lifestyles and diet. Campaigns such as Jamie's School Dinner, Ministry of Food and Food Revolution USA combine Oliver’s culinary tools, cookbooks and television, with serious activism and community organizing -- to create change on both the individual and governmental level.

Join Jamie's Food Revolution: Sign the petition >>

Fiorenzo Omenetto is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and leads the laboratory for Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics and Biophotonics at Tufts University and also holds an appointment in the Department of Physics. Formerly a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory before joining Tufts, his research is focused on interdisciplinary themes that span nonlinear optics, nanostructured materials (such as photonic crystals and photonic crystal fibers), optofluidics and biopolymer based photonics. He has published over 100 papers and peer-review contributions across these various disciplines.

Since moving to Tufts at the end of 2005, he has proposed and pioneered (with David Kaplan) the use of silk as a material platform for photonics, optoelectronics and high-technology applications. This new research platform has recently been featured in MIT's Technology Review as one of the 2010 "top ten technologies likely to change the world."

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Eli Pariser created a website calling for a multilateral approach to fighting terrorism. In the following weeks, over half a million people from 192 countries signed on, and Pariser rather unexpectedly became an online organizer. The website merged with MoveOn.org in November 2001, and Pariser -- then 20 years old -- joined the group to direct its foreign policy campaigns. He led what the New York Times Magazine called the "mainstream arm of the peace movement" -- tripling MoveOn's member base and demonstrating how large numbers of small donations could be mobilized through online engagement.

In 2004, Pariser became executive director of MoveOn. Under his leadership, MoveOn.org Political Action has grown to 5 million members and raised over $120 million from millions of small donors to support advocacy campaigns and political candidates. Pariser focused MoveOn on online-to-offline organizing, developing phone-banking tools and precinct programs in 2004 and 2006 that laid the groundwork for Barack Obama's extraordinary web-powered campaign. In 2008, Pariser transitioned the Executive Director role at MoveOn to Justin Ruben and became President of MoveOn’s board; he's now a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

His book The Filter Bubble is set for release May 12, 2011. In it, he asks how modern search tools -- the filter by which many of see the wider world -- are getting better and better and screening the wider world from us, by returning only the search results it "thinks" we want to see.

Handspring Puppet Company was founded in 1981 by four graduates of the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, South Africa. Two of the co-founders, Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, continue to run the company. Originally they created shows for children and thereafter works for adult audiences. Arguably one of the greatest puppetry companies in the world, Handspring has since collaborated with a succession of innovative South Africa directors including Malcolm Purkey, Barney Simon and artist William Kentridge.

Apart from seasons throughout theatres across South Africa, Handspring has been presented at many international festivals including Edinburgh, the Avignon Festival, the Next Wave Festival at BAM in New York, The African Odyssey Festival at the Kennedy Centre in Washington, Theatre d' Automne in Paris, Theatre der Welt in Germany, as well as in Hong Kong, Singapore, Adelaide, Zurich and Bogota.

The company provides an artistic home and professional base for a core group of performers, designers, theatre artists and technicians who collaborate with them on a project basis. Based in South Africa they continue to explore the boundaries of adult puppet theatre within an African context.

"War Horse" is currently playing in London, at the New London Theatre, and opens in New York at Lincoln Center on April 14, 2011.

Rajesh Rao is looking for the computational principles underlying the brain's remarkable ability to learn, process and store information --  hoping to apply this knowledge to the task of building adaptive robotic systems and artificially intelligent agents.

Some of the questions that motivate his research include: How does the brain learn efficient representations of novel objects and events occurring in the natural environment? What are the algorithms that allow useful sensorimotor routines and behaviors to be learned? What computational mechanisms allow the brain to adapt to changing circumstances and remain fault-tolerant and robust?

By investigating these questions within a computational and probabilistic framework, it is often possible to derive algorithms that not only provide functional interpretations of neurobiological properties but also suggest solutions to difficult problems in computer vision, speech, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Carlo Ratti is a civil engineer and architect who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the SENSEable City Laboratory. This lab studies the built environment of cities -- from street grids to plumbing and garbage systems -- using new kinds of sensors and hand-held electronics that have transformed the way we can describe and understand cities.

Other projects flip this equation -- using data gathered from sensors to actually create dazzling new environments. The Digital Water Pavilion, for instance, reacts to visitors by parting a stream of water to let them visit. And a new project for the 2012 Olympics in London turns a pavilion building into a cloud of blinking interactive art. 

For more information on the projects in this talk, visit SENSEable @ TED >>

Deb Roy directs the Cognitive Machines group at the MIT Media Lab, where he studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways. To enable this work, he has pioneered new data-driven methods for analyzing and modeling human linguistic and social behavior. He has authored numerous scientific papers on artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, human-machine interaction, data mining, and information visualization.

Deb Roy was the co-founder and serves as CEO of Bluefin Labs, a venture-backed technology company. Built upon deep machine learning principles developed in his research over the past 15 years, Bluefin has created a technology platform that analyzes social media commentary to measure real-time audience response to TV ads and shows.

Follow Deb Roy on Twitter>

Roy adds some relevant papers:

Deb Roy. (2009). New Horizons in the Study of Child Language Acquisition. Proceedings of Interspeech 2009. Brighton, England. bit.ly/fSP4Qh

Brandon C. Roy, Michael C. Frank and Deb Roy. (2009). Exploring word learning in a high-density longitudinal corpus. Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Amsterdam, Netherlands. bit.ly/e1qxej

Plenty more papers on our research including technology and methodology can be found here, together with other research from my lab at MIT: bit.ly/h3paSQ

The work that I mentioned on relationships between television content and the social graph is being done at Bluefin Labs (www.bluefinlabs.com). Details of this work have not been published. The social structures we are finding (and that I highlighted in my TED talk) are indeed new. The social media communication channels that are leading to their formation did not even exist a few years ago, and Bluefin's technology platform for discovering these kinds of structures is the first of its kind. We'll certainly have more to say about all this as we continue to dig into this fascinating new kind of data, and as new social structures continue to evolve!

Kathryn Schulz is a journalist, author, and public speaker with a credible (if not necessarily enviable) claim to being the world's leading wrongologist.  Her freelance writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, the Boston Globe, the "Freakonomics" blog of The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications. She is the former editor of the online environmental magazine Grist, and a former reporter and editor for The Santiago Times, of Santiago, Chile, where she covered environmental, labor, and human rights issues. She was a 2004 recipient of the Pew Fellowship in International Journalism (now the International Reporting Project), and has reported from throughout Central and South America, Japan, and, most recently, the Middle East. A graduate of Brown University and a former Ohioan, Oregonian and Brooklynite, she currently lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

Though it was as high-concept as any reality-TV show, Morgan Spurlock's 2004 film Super Size Me was something else entirely: a critique of modern fast-feeding, wrapped in the personal story of a charming, curious host. And "host" can be taken literally: eating only McDonald's for 30 days straight, Spurlock went into a shocking physical and emotional decline, showing via his own body the truth about junk food. After this Oscar-nominated doc came Spurlock's three-seasons-long unscripted TV show, 30 Days, based on another lifehack: Send a person to live, for 30 days, inside another worldview. Stories from 30 Days are human, engaging, surprising: An anti-immigrant activist warms to a tight-knit family of border-crossers; an outsourced US engineer meets the Indian engineer who holds his old job; a former pro football player spends 30 days navigating the world in a wheelchair.

In 2008, Spurlock released Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, about his months-long trek through Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Palestine ... following leads and interviewing people along the way. (In an interview, he guessed he got within 50 miles of Osama before winding up the hunt.) He was also part of a group-filmed version of Freakonomics. He wrote a book about his fast-food odyssey, called Don't Eat This Book -- while his wife, vegan chef Alex Jamieson, wrote a bestseller about the eight-week cleansing diet she put Spurlock on after he got supersized.

His latest film, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, dives into the mysterious world of brand sponsorship, a major influence on how pop culture is developed and shared. Almost totally sponsored itself, the film was the first to be sold at Sundance 2011, and, it's said, made a profit before it even opened. The film debuts in US theaters on April 22, 2011.

Daniel Tammet is a writer, linguist and educator. He is the creator of Optimnem, a website that has provided language learning instruction to thousands around the globe. His 2006 memoir "Born on a Blue Day" describes his life with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome; his new book, "Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind," is a personal and scientific exploration of how the brain works and the differences and similarities between savant and non-savant minds.

Tammet set a European record on March 14, 2004, when he recited the mathematical constant pi (3.141...) to 22,514 decimal places from memory in a time of 5 hours, 9 minutes.

Working in musicals, Shakespeare, film and opera, Julie Taymor is a wildly imaginative and provocative director and designer. She is perhaps best known for having translated the film The Lion King to Broadway, a still-running show for which she also designed costumes, masks and puppets, wrote music and lyrics -- and won two Tony Awards. (She is the first woman to win a Tony for directing a musical.) She's also received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, as well as two Obies, an Emmy and an Oscar.

Her recent stage work has focused on opera, with a production of Mozart's The Magic Flute in New York in 2005, and Grendel, which she co-wrote, in Los Angeles and New York in 2006. Meanwhile, she has developed a fascinating career in the movies. Her most recent film is 2007's Across the Universe, a romp through the music of the Beatles. Add this to 1999's Titus, a visually remarkable adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and the glorious Frida, a 2002 film about Frida Kahlo. Taymor is now working on a Broadway musical in collaboration with Bono based on Marvel Studios' Spider-Man.

Edward Tenner is an independent writer and speaker on the history of technology and the unintended consequences of innovation. He writes for The Atlantic on history and current events, and was a founding advisor of Smithsonian's Lemelson Center, where he remains a senior research associate. He was executive editor for physical science and history at Princeton University Press, he has been a visiting lecturer at Princeton and has held visiting research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. He is now a visiting scholar in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information and an affiliate of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School.

Eric Whitacre began his music career singing in his college choir; by 21, he had written his first concert work, Go, Lovely Rose, and advanced to Juilliard, where he studied under John Corigliano. Today, he has published more than four dozen choral works, conducted in some of the most esteemed halls in the world, and featured on dozens of recordings. His album Cloudburst and Other Choral Works earned him a Grammy nomination in 2007, as did his Decca debut Light & Gold, while his new album, Water Night, debuted at #1 in US iTunes classical charts.

You may know him, too, as the creator and conductor of the virtual choir, a network of YouTube-connected singers whose voices blend together online to become true magic. And he's now touring with the Eric Whitacre Signers, a 28-voice choir (yes, they're all in the same room).

A specialist in bioluminescence, Edith Widder helps design and invent new submersible instruments and equipment to study bioluminescence and enable unobtrusive observation of deep-sea environments. Her innovative tools for exploration have produced footage of rare and wonderful bioluminescent displays and never-before-seen denizens of the deep, including, most recently, the first video ever recorded of the giant squid, Architeuthis, in its natural habitat.

In 2005 she founded the Ocean Research & Conservation Association (ORCA), which is dedicated to protecting aquatic ecosystems and the species they sustain through the development of innovative technologies and science-based conservation action.;  In an effort to protect and revitalize the ocean she loves she has been focusing on developing tools for finding and tracking pollution -- a major threat to all of our water ecosystems and ultimately to human health. She was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2006.

In 2012, Widder was among the team that filmed the giant squid (Architeuthis) for the first time in its home ocean.